don't shop on the internet go out to a store here's why

The candle-as-gift stigma applies only when one buys it at CVS, that should be made clear.

SNL sketches aside, if you're out in the world getting something that's, like, Le Labo or Byredo, then you've shown your friends you're willing to drop cash on their private luxury. That's not the point of this quite pointless story, I'm just setting the scene.

I buy the good candles for a few close friends and, to that end, I went out to a Beverly Hills department store. There's a vintage Santa Claus and reindeer hovering across Wilshire Boulvard. If you're stuck at a red light close to it, you can see the old-timey painted detail. It welcomes you into the most touristy shopping area of this entire city, and that's lovely. You're adjacent to Rodeo Drive. You don't shop on that street but it's there to gawk at as you drive past.

I could have ordered everything online, but at Christmas I want to be in a store, like when Mary Tyler Moore meets her friend on the escalator in Ordinary People while wearing one in a series of impeccable sweaters, and they smile and talk about how awful it all is and it's 1980. It wasn't awful. It was great. It is great.

It's great because you get to see how a department store's visual merchandising crew makes it festive. Unless they've decided to be boring on that particular year, you get a free show just from the display cases. I want to be seduced with design and lightly festive piped-in music. Make me buy shit. I'm ready to roll.

A bonus: the moment other shoppers get weird in public.

I buy the candles right away. I love these friends. They deserve a high-end smell in their home. I know what I'm there for and I execute my plan. Then I move to the next floor to browse around, and when I'm browsing I like to be left alone with my Christmas thoughts. That never happens for some reason. Alonso is always impressed by how magnetizing I am to screwy people who see me and want to express themselves.

The next floor is extremely expensive bags and even more expensive jewelry and, off to the side, in a corner, a nook of pre-wrapped gifts for people you barely know. Chocolates that cost too much. Coffee-table books no one cares about. Rich people bringing something, anything, to a party for the host. Here: re-gift it or whatever. I head directly to this area.

"Think diamonds!" says a woman I've spotted out of my peripheral vision. She's with another woman. I think they're talking to each other. I ignore them.

"Think diamonds! For your wife!" she says.

I look up. She is talking to me. I stare back. "Diamonds! For your wife!"

Me: "I'm gay."

Her, louder: "YOU COULD STILL HAVE A WIFE."

I continue to stare. The friend butts in to help her: "No! No! A husband!"

The first woman: "Yes! Diamonds for your husband!"

Me: "Ok. Goodbye now."

Had I stayed home, planned well, shopped online early, had the gifts delivered directly to the friends, bypassing me, bypassing the need to wrap them and hand the items directly to them, I never would have met this lady, a representative of a still-oblivious heterosexual population that never thinks before they speak, one who imagines my husband to be a diamond enthusiast.

So do it. Walk into the fancy store. Mind your own business. Meet an increasingly unhinged, older, moneyed shopper with things to say and no one to say them to. They're out there waiting to talk to you.